54 and fund allocations in the department that would, in May, come under the administration of his bureau. Rain brushed the windows above the couch. His hands grew cold. Silently and sud- denly the light in the next room went out, leaving the curtained glass door black and the light from the smal1 reading lamp very dim. The cousin was in that room. The house was full of people he did not know. This porch, cold, in night and rain, was strange to him. They never used the porch ex- cept in summer, on hot days This was not the trip he had started out on. To come home, that was one true direc- ø -e- , tIon; but now it had lost its sense, he had ended up in a strange place. vVas this confusion what they called grief? She is dead, he thought, she is dead, as he lay fairly comfortably propped against the arm of the couch, the book open against his raised knees under the quilt, gazing at the page numbers 144, 145, and waited for the reaction. But he had left home long ago, after all. 144, 145. His eyes returned to the paragraph he had been reading. He read to the end of the section. His watch saId two-thirty. He turned off the bronze-shaded reading lamp and huddled down under the blankets and j::/ . ".., . eo011\ NOVEMDER 12, 1979 quilt; he heard the rain brush quietly against the windows. "I am going to Paraguay," he told the salesman, an- noyed at being asked. "To Paragua- nanza, the capital of the natIon" But they met long delays along the line from floods of water, and when he got there, across terrible abysses, to Para- guananza, it was no different from here. METEMPSYCHOSIS W HEN the lawyer's letter came, Eduard Russe thought nothing at first about the house that had been willed to him, but tried only to dredge up from the shifty bogs of memory some shard or fragment-a cranium, a fingerbone-of that great-uncle, hIS mother's father's brother, who had seen fit, or been forced by a paucity of sur- vivors, to leave him the house in Brai- lava. He had always lived in Krasnoy; when he was nine or ten, he had gone with his mother to visit their northern relatives, but of that journey he could recall only the most trivial things: a hen with her brood of chicks in a back ya 1 d bv a basket, a man standing and singing aloud on a street corner direct- ly under (so his child's eye averred) a huge dark-blue mountain. Of the grandfath r who had then owned the house, of the great-uncle who had next inherited it nothing remained but a discomfort of dark rooms and loud old voices. Old men, deaf, not the same species as himself, no kin. Crossed swords with basket grips and curved blades, hanging on a chimney: sabres. He had never seen a sabre. He Was not aJIowed to play with them. The old men did nothIng with them, did not keep them polished. If they had let him take them dOWJ1, he would have polished them. He Was ashamed, now, of this ingratitude of mind which left him only his childish envies and not one glimpse of the man who had gIven him a house, even if he did not want the house and could wish the old man had, equally, forgotten him. What was he to do with a house in Brailava? \Vhat was he supposed to reply to the 1(;1 wyer's letter? Employed in the Bu- reau of Housing, on modest salary, he had never had any use for lawyers and had kept well clear of the breed. HIS wife would have known how to answer the letter; she had good sense about such things, and good manners, too. F'ollowing what he imagined Elena lTIIght have written, he produced a short, civil acknowledgment of the lawyer's communication, pòsted it, and then in fact altogether forgot about the gI eat-uncle, the legacy, the property in